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Major European Library Joins Google Book Search

The Bavarian State Library, or Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, one of Europe’s most important and most visited research libraries, has joined Google’s ongoing efforts to digitize public domain books and make them fully available on Google Book Search. The library is the 13th, and the largest non-English, participant in the project. This latest addition will make books by Goethe and the Brothers Grimm available for searching, along with more obscure German titles, as well as titles in French, Spanish, Latin, Italian, and English dating back centuries.

Google’s Inside Google Book Search blog called the addition of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek “a significant step towards enriching our multilingual index” and reported that the addition will add more than one million out-of-copyright books to the database. Jens Redmer, head of Google Book Search Europe, Middle East, and Africa, compared the potential impact of the digitization process to the dissemination of information after the invention of the printing press, saying, “Today, everyone with internet access — regardless of age or location — can discover information on their specific subject of interest, in almost any language, with only a few strokes on a keyboard. I find that absolutely fantastic.”